At Tickifieds we strive to provide a safe and friendly place where buyers and sellers of event tickets can connect. Since we opened our doors (as FreeTicketClassifieds.com) all the way back in 2008, we have tried our best to manually review all ads posted on the site and remove the spam and the scams. We think we have done a pretty good job over the years but as the site continues to grow, it has become more popular with the spammers. As such, it has become increasingly time consuming keeping up with the spam and has starting restricting our ability to focus on what we all care about…more eyeballs on our ads.

So, in order to cut down on the amount of spam we get, we have decided to charge a nominal fee to post ticket listings at Tickifieds. Previously, users were allowed to post up to 10 ads at no charge. Starting on August 21st, we will begin charging $1 for those same 10 listing. We hope that this small fee will prevent a large proportion of the spammers from impacting the service we provide to both ticket buyers and sellers. This charge is also considerably less than similar services like Craigslist (now $5 per ad) and Backpage ($1 per ad). We certainly think a mere 10 cents per ad is a bargain. For our Premium Members, we will continue to offer unlimited posting packages for as low as $25 per month.

Our last announcement is that we have decided to start another Tickifieds Blog (Tickifieds Daily Ticket Trends) that will focus on the most popular events and on sale updates. Now that we no longer have to continuously check for spam, we have more time to focus on our marketing efforts and provide additional services for our members. Since the majority of our paying members are ticket brokers, this information has proven to be very useful for event ticket marketing. After http://freeonsalelist.com/ stopped posting on sale updates, many ticket brokers were left in the dark. At our new blog we will featuring daily updates on what tickets went on sale and what tickets are currently hot. If you haven’t already, please check out our new blog here. If you have any feature requests or suggestions please let us know in the comments!

Top Events Week 23 (5/28/2013 to 6/4/2013)

T-minus 9 days until One Direction lands on U.S. soil to play the first of their sold out concerts. First up is Sunrise Florida and the BB&T Center on 6/13/2013.

Jake Bugg has conquered the UK and will be looking to do the same here with his first US tour this summer and fall.

2.Taylor Swift

T-Swift came up a bit short in her bid to unseat the reigning champion One Direction. Tayor Swift will be out in Canada for the next couple of weeks before heading back to the state to resume her Red Tour.

Another youngster to make the Tickifieds Top 10 – Jake Bugg. The 19 year old often compared to Bob Dylan has already had a pretty remarkable career in his native England, is just now getting regular airplay in the US. Jake Bugg is certainly someone to watch! Hot shows include 9/17 in New York, 9/21 in Chicago and 9/18 in Boston.

The Blackhawks pulled off a stunning comeback against the Detroit Red Wings to advance to the NHL Eastern Conference Finals against the LA Kings. The Hawks are up 2-0 in the series and are just 2 wins from getting back to the Stanley Cup finals.

9. Mindless Behavior

Mindless Behavior is the latest in the seemingly long line of boy bands to make a splash on the Tickifieds Top 10. Mindless Behavior will kick off their summer tour on 7/3 with a show at the Bob Hope Theater in Stockton CA. Other popular shows include 7/9 in KC, 7/14 in Greensboro and 7/25 in Baltimore.

10. Miami Heat

The Miami Heat squeaked out a series win over the Indiana Pacers and will face the San Antonio Spurs in the 2013 NBA Finals. Despite the fact that Heat look really vulnerable with the Big 3 reverting back to the Big 1, demand for Heat tickets are strong. Probably because this may be about it for the current Heat bunch.

If you are a ticket broker or own a ticket related website you know first hand getting visibility on the major search engines is no easy task. Every year, many ticket websites spend thousands of dollars optimizing their websites for the search engines with hopes of getting more traffic. Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is a multi-billion dollar industry. However, is such a competitive industry such as ours it can be difficult to get and maintain search engine visibility when the rules are constantly changing. From Pandas to Penguins, it can be really hard to keep up with all the latest algorithm tweaks.

While we certainly do not have any magic formula to help you increase the visibility of your ticket website, we do have a way to increase the visibility of your ticket ads listed at Tickifieds.com. If you have been paying attention to Google lately, they have been on a mission to build up their social network aptly named Google+. Many SEO experts have hypothesized that Google’s dip into the social network arena is not only an attempt to attract more users to their products but to also improve their search results. One of the ways they are attempting to tie their social platform to the search engine results is by employing the rel=”author” tag. Unlike other social platforms, Google+ allows you to connect your social profile across the internet, and in a sense, validate your identify. This is done by identifying a Google+ profile id as an author of any type of content across the web.

One of the big advantages of tagging your content with your Google+ profile is that, over time, if you become a trusted source of valuable content, Google may show preference for your content when it displays search results. Although the above sentence is largely speculation, there is no doubt that Google is encouraging users to link their content to their Google+ profile. As a reward for people who employ the authorship markup, Google will display your Google+ profile picture next to the associated search engine result. These images have shown to drastically increase clicks-throughs so even if authorship doesn’t provide a boost in the search engines, people will be more likely to land on your page or ad.

Here are a few examples of a how a Tickifieds Ad looks when displayed in the Google search results with verified authorship markup.

So, now that we know its probably a good idea to start using the author markup on all your web content, how does one add this markup? Well, at Tickifieds.com we made it really easy! Just follow these steps below.

1). If you haven’t already, sign up for a Google+ profile at https://plus.google.com and be sure to include a profile picture with a “recognizable headshot”.

2). Find your Google+ Profile url. It should look something like mine : https://plus.google.com/u/0/114868684757175395718. To find yours, just log into Google+ and look for your profile picture in the upper right hand corner and select “View Profile”.

3). Log into your Tickifieds account and select “Edit My Profile”. Look for the field titled, “Google+ Author Profile” and paste in your Google+ profile url from step 2. Click submit to save your profile. We automatically add your Google+ profile with the rel=”author” tag to each of your ads.

4). The next step of the verification process is to add a reciprocal link back from your profile to Tickifieds.com. To do this, Click Edit profile, then click the Contributor To section on the right (depending on how many photos you have, you may need to scroll to see this section), and then click Add custom link. Enter Tickifieds.com, then click save.

5) Test your markup and see what author data Google can extract. Go to the Google structure data testing tool at: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets. Go back to Tickifieds and find the url for one of your ads and copy it. Paste the copied url to the Structured Data Testing Tool and click “Preview”. If it is all setup correctly, you will see your profile image appear next to the preview search result listing.

6). That’s it….you’re all done!

If you have any trouble setting this up feel free to let me know and we’ll get you setup!

It’s no secret that the world has gone mobile. With over 750 million smart phones and tablets in use throughout the world, more and more people are browsing the web and shopping from mobile devices. While smart phones and tablets have standard web browsers, most websites are not optimized for display on smaller screens. As such Tickifieds is happy to announce the official launch of our new and improved mobile website and Android App.

We decide to discontinue the beta version of our Android App after nearly a year of being in the Google Play Store. In that time, we racked in over 13,000 downloads which resulted in over 150,000 unique sessions and over 900,000 page views. That is no small feat for an application in which we did little to no marketing for. While the new version of the Tickifieds Mobile application is much the same as the beta version, we plan to extensively market this version.

We decide to produce only an Android version of our mobile app as there are over 480 million active Android users compared to only 244 million Apple iPhone and iPad users. If our Android App continues to be successful we may go ahead and develop an iPhone Application as well. However, smart phone and tablet growth seems to be geared towards Android.

If you have a chance please check out our new Android App: Tickifeds Ticket Classifieds. Any feedback, reviews, and/or comments would be appreciated.

At Tickifieds, we are constantly working hard to make our website the defacto marketplace to sell event tickets. In case you haven’t noticed we are constantly tinkering with the design, layout, and functionality of our site to improve the visitor experience. Over the past weekend we rolled out a few changes to our design. The most noticeable change is our new logo.

Tickifieds new logo which rolled out on 9/22/2012.

Tickifieds old logo which dates back to 6/10/2011.

We had some comments recently that our logo and site design was a little amateurish and made the site look a little spammy. So we decided to clean up the logo and header a bit with some high-resolution images. Although the new logo was still created by an amatuer (me), we feel the design is much more sleek and will further help promote the brand that is Tickifieds. In this day and age when search engines are constantly tinkering with algorithms, it is becoming increasingly important to properly brand your website so that people remember it.

Another small change we made was to update the “Submit Ad” button. We realized that the new logo no longer matched the button. Below is the before and after images.

Tickifieds new submit ad button

Tickifieds old submit ad button.

Last, but not least we added a rich texture to the header so that it matches our blog. Now, no matter what Tickifieds property you are visiting (e.g. our blog, Tickifieds USA, Tickifieds Europe, etc.), you will have the same look and feel throughout our network of sites.